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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

If you want to read about the world's scariest saint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev

  Now Olga gave to each soldier in her army a pigeon or a 
  sparrow, and ordered them to attach by thread to each 
  pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulfur bound with small 
  pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers 
  release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew 
  to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the 
  sparrows under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the 
  porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not 
  a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to 
  extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught on 
  fire at once.

...but no explanation for the spontaneous combustion of the cloth-bound sulfur.

Sounds like it was probably a closely-kept, obfuscated military secret like Greek Fire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

Certain chemicals will spontaneously combust when wrapped in cloth. They absorb into the cloth, and the increased surface area exposed to the air lets them react with oxygen faster, producing heat. The cloth also insulates it so the heat slowly builds up until it gets hot enough to combust.

This is why keeping oily rags are a fire hazard.

Super glue does this if you put it on cotton wool.

I found this out as a child by accident and set fire to the desk in my bedroom...

To be fair that desk caught fire quite a few times.

Hehe, same here. And then my Dad would come in calmly pointing out that this house might come in in handy as a place to live in the future as well.

He once really stalled on us, we were stuffing an empty 7.62 cartridge with explosives and he very clearly explained that while he though we shouldn't make fireworks at least we shouldn't use metal parts.

We continued with a small plastic tube and a couple of hours later it went off in my hand. I love my Dad for a lot of reasons.

Now that's how it should be! Good for you.

We weren't blessed with such weaponry in the UK. About all we got was 12 gauge shotgun cartridges and anything we made ourselves. The latter included ANFO so we made up for it through chemistry. This was 25 years ago; doing this now would get you chucked in prison in 2 seconds flat.

It's more of a mythos than a documentary. In reality they could've used more conventional incendiary weapons of the time to burn down Korosten, then historians may have made a nice-sounding legend.

Maybe they lit the pieces of sulphur that were attached by strings to the birds before they released them.

The text in Russian talks about burning piece of sulfur-soaked oakum.

Seems like the admission criteria for sainthood are laxer than at DeVry.

Actually not, though it's rather different form what somebody not knowledgeable about religion and, most importantly, history of denominations of the Christian Church would expect. In fact most of saints ("saints" like those who are called "святой", not "блаженный") in orthodox church are rather militant people. Historically, their reasons for being acknowledged as saints isn't starving themselves to death somewhere far in the mountains, but "protecting homeland from pagans" and such.

I once took a class at a Jesuit university named "Witches, saints and heretics." The TL;DR was that these are not disjoint groups of people.

Well, Jesuit way to treat thing is very different even from "canonic Catholic" (yeah, sounds a little weird after we have Jesuit pope), not to say about Orthodox Church and it is not unusual for them to conclude that "black and white are essentially one and the same thing after all", so I probably wouldn't relate contents of that class to discussion about some Orthodox saint too much. AFAIK Olga isn't treated as saint in Catholic Church, is she?

I probably should have clarified that the professor was himself a lay person. Basically the term "witch", "saint" or "heretic" was applied based on the social context of the individual, or a moral judgment made by the church or the population surrounding the individual. Heretics were people the Church didn't agree with, saints were those whose actions were approved by the Church. The Church has been known to change its stance over time, and some individuals have fallen into multiple categories at various times. Famously, Joan of Arc was at various points a witch, a heretic, and a saint.

Regarding Olga, she christianized Rus and here sainthood was recognition of that. I don't actually know if she was ever considered a saint by the Roman Church.

it seems almost as lax as the nobel peace prize...

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